What a day it's been already. I woke up to Brian shoving his cold hands up and down my shirt, in my face, kissing me with his cold lips, tickling and freezing me until I screamed. I think I was upset for about 32 seconds but after I came down from the shower he asked me if I was still upset. 'No!' I exclaimed incredulously. 'I'm fine.'

Then we went by his office briefly so he could pick up a car part for his mother, and he decided to vacuum his truck. This meant I had to get out of the truck, and stand in the rain while he vacuumed. He probably didn't think of this because he is, as I described him once, 'the kind of person who just gets rained on,' but I was annoyed that he hadn't bothered to think of a place that I could stand and not be wet while he vacuumed. Well. I let it pass, mostly because he really is the kind of person who just gets rained on.

Then we went to the dump. And as he dumped the trash I started crying. No, seriously! I had started to think about how vastly our lives differ, and how my life, from childhood, has been a life of ignorant luxury. I've never been given much opportunity to realize just how much I had then, how much I have now, because to some degree my parents either don't know or will never tell me just how much money or privilege I actually have. I've never taken trash to the dump. We have a trash man. And it never occurred to me, until that moment I sat in Brian's truck as he stood in the back tossing bag after bag into the dumpster, that we pay for this service. I always thought it was free, like the mailman.

I couldn't really figure out how to articulate this to Brian when he got back in the car and asked me why I was crying. So I said it was nothing and that I was fine, and he held my hand and I touched his cheek and ear as we drove quietly to get brunch.

As we sat at the pancake house I asked him if he was okay and he said no. 'Why?' I wanted to know.

'You won't talk to me,' he said simply.

I sighed. 'I didn't know what to say. I'm not mad at you.'

'Well, I don't know. I thought maybe you were still mad about my cold hands this morning.'

'I got over that in about five minutes!'

'Then why were you crying at the dump?'

So, I told him. It's really difficult for me to explain things like this to him because I don't want him to think that I look down on his and his family's lifestyle or class. I didn't know how to say 'I'm humbled every day that I'm with you' without sounding like a pretentious spoiled upper middle class princess. But that's the truth - I am. I grew up with certain standards of life and people that I would surround myself with, and being with him somehow both breaks and keeps those standards. Yes, in some ways his life is simpler than mine. He doesn't need much to be happy. Just the outdoors and a good pair of shoes. In other ways I feel like I don't measure up - that I'm perpetually losing in the 'better person' competition. My private liberal arts college education holds nothing over his practical knowledge, physical agility and mechanical repertoire. He carries so much responsibility in his household, whereas I feel superbly accomplished if I wash the dishes without my mother hinting that I should.

We played Guitar Hero this afternoon and I quickly realized that I couldn't keep up with the notes. The game frustrates me for several reasons that I can't quite pinpoint, but I think a part of me feels like I'm better than it because I've played real music in the past. But no matter how much I tried to find patterns in the random strains of notes, or time my fingers to conquer my intuition, I inevitably became overwhelmed and - you guessed it - began to cry. This confounded Brian. 'Why are you so upset?'

'Because I SUCK!!!'

I think it has more to do with the fact that I'm sucking at something in front of him, and he's obviously had more practice and is probably more inclined to be good at video games because of the afore-mentioned agility and mechanically-driven brain. He doesn't quite understand why this upsets me so much - but how can I help him understand that I spent the first 21 years of my life being at the top of the class in almost every way? And that despite that, I also spent those years trying to 'catch up' with my older brother who was better than me in almost every common talent? So in essence I always won but never won?

And that now, after a lifetime of being socialized to believe that a better education and better social status equals a better person, I'm feeling inadequate next to someone, (albeit someone I love) who I find to be better than me in so many ways, yet not in the ways that I had always been taught mattered?

How do I explain that a video game made me feel this way?